


The Wounding

by ama



Category: Oz (TV)
Genre: Angst, Asexual Character, Canon Queer Character of Color, Complicated Relationships, Cuddling & Snuggling, Disabled Character, Drug Use, Hurt/Comfort, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Past Child Abuse, Post-Canon, Relationship Study, Scars, Self-Harm, Slurs, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-01
Updated: 2014-07-01
Packaged: 2018-02-06 22:46:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1875300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ama/pseuds/ama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A relationship told through scars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wounding

**Author's Note:**

> Because I really, really want their relationship to be complicated and a little bit fucked up but mutually affectionate. All Spanish is translated below (except for endearments, because the exact translation isn't really necessary), but fair warning--it is mostly taken from the internet, and there might be some errors where I tried to change the speaker.
> 
> Title from a Linda Hogan quote: “Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing.”

They think that the milky sheen over his eye is affected—a colored contact lens, donned in order to make people uncomfortable, like the way he wears high heels that make him nearly six and a half feet tall, or the way he litters his speech with terms of endearments no matter what he says or who he says it to. Alonzo likes making people feel uncomfortable, so he lets them think that. The truth is, he’s blind in that eye. He has been ever since he was five years old, sitting on the sidelines of a rum-drenched row between his parents, and one of them (he can’t remember which) hurled a bottle to the ground. It shattered, and he was caught in the spray of glass. He sat there for God knows how long, screaming, rubbing at the pain in his eye and screaming when that made it hurt more, until the fight died down and they thought to actually look at him. The doctors at the hospital were very good; they managed to save the eye. But even when the glass was removed and the wound healed over, he couldn’t see. Too much scar tissue.

Miguel Alvarez has scars, too. The first one Alonzo notices, of course, is the slice across his face. It’s the most beautiful scar he’s ever seen, red like fresh blood and sharp like a needle, running the course of his jaw. The first question he asks in Oz is “who is that?” and the second is “how did he get that scar?”

He did it to himself, Fiona says. No one knows why. Some say it’s to impress the other men in the gang he used to run with, some say it was a tribute to his grandfather. Some say he’s just fucking nuts.

The next scar he sees in their pod, that first night. Miguel’s voice is like smoke, like that first scratchy drag of a cigarette into virgin lungs. Alonzo wants to breathe him in but he moves slowly, carefully, not sure what to do. He thinks that Miguel might be very close to breaking, but whether that will end in tears or blood, he doesn’t know. He’s almost relieved when Miguel asks for Destiny. He turns around and his eyes are terrifyingly dark.

“You want to party, baby?” he murmurs, and he sounds so young. “Keep those D-tabs coming.”

He opens his mouth like he’s asking for the Eucharist, and Alonzo tenderly places the drug on his tongue. He lets his hand fall to Miguel’s chest and hears the rattle of his breath in the air between them. Is Alonzo breathing? He can’t tell. Miguel is beautiful, the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, but not perfect—he feels the bud of scar tissue under his fingers, short and thick and a quarter of an inch from his heart.

“Who tried to break your heart, cariño?” he croons lowly as he traces the scar with the pad of his index finger.

“That one was Guerra.” Miguel takes his hand and moves it, places it on another line on his side. “That was some old guy named Giles.” He slides Alonzo’s hand again, moves it to his back, and Alonzo wraps both arms around his waist. “Don’t know who did that one,” Miguel says and Alonzo’s hands skirt the expanse of his back, searching for the scar, but it must be too flat because he can find nothing by touch alone. “Happened on my intake day. I didn’t even make it into Em City.”

Miguel reaches up and puts his hands on Alonzo’s shoulders. Moves up, fingernails scratching softly at his neck, and curls into the short hair on the back of Alonzo’s neck, pulling him down.

“Pobrecito… te progeré,” he whispers, because suddenly he realizes that that’s what it is, that he doesn’t want to fuck Miguel Alvarez, he doesn’t want to be him, that he wants to protect him. To memorize and preserve the spaces between his scars.

He wants every moment to be like this one, like Miguel’s lips forming a crooked grin a split-second before they kiss.

They take things slow. Miguel is quieter than the first two days that Alonzo knew him, more tired, and after a day or two he tells him about the parole board. Alonzo kisses his temple and offers him a D-tab, and feels rather good about himself when Miguel curls into his shoulder to seek comfort. In general he feels like shit, because fuck, is this what Oz does to people? But he feels good about the fact that he can lock Miguel safely in his arms.

After a few weeks, when they return to a nonhazardous Oz, they start to settle into a routine. Alonzo is assigned work detail in the telemarketing office, because there is no dangerous heavy machinery lurking in the corner of his shitty peripheral vision, and because his work on the outside means that he has good people skills—according to McManus. (That day he goes back to their pod at night and demands “Is this fucker serious?” and Miguel laughs out loud and it’s the sweetest sound Alonzo’s ever heard.) He is there for a week before he leverages his way into a job working for Querns instead, which is good because he’s always had a good head for names, numbers, places and people. It’s also good because it’s easier to get Destiny in, and his slow takeover of Oz runs right on schedule.

Miguel sits with him at meals and tells him about Oz and Em City, about the way things work, who the players are. Sometimes he sits in on business meetings; he’s good at sensing other people’s bullshit, and when he’s not agitated he can shrewdly calculate risks and rewards. Still, he resists becoming a full partner in Alonzo’s operation, and maybe that’s because he’s uncomfortable around Fiona and Gabe and the rest of the gays, or maybe it’s because he harbors a deep, animalistic terror of solitary. That fear is not so much a scar as a raw wound, scabbed over but still new enough that it oozes blood at the slightest scrape.

Miguel goes to Confession every Saturday and Mass every Sunday. Alonzo hasn’t gone to a service in decades, hasn’t even stepped inside a church since his mother’s funeral—and that was only to make sure the bitch was really dead. Once, Miguel pauses at the door to their pod as he goes to leave and asks if Alonzo wants to come to Mass, too.

“What the fuck has God ever done for me?” he asks with a cynical smile. “What’s he done for you, darling?”

He regrets his words when Miguel flinches, but doesn’t take them back.

“I dunno. But Father Mukada’s done enough. He actually—cares. About things. I figure I owe it to him to try and do the same.”

He flexes his hand—there’s a scar on his palm, thick and brutish and mangled—and shrugs again and leaves. Alonzo doesn’t follow him, doesn’t pray, but he spends most of the morning sitting in his pod and picturing Miguel not in Oz’s cafeteria-cum-stage-cum-church, but in the cathedral on the street Alonzo grew up on, bathed in the cool blue light filtered through the stained glass portrait of Nuestra Señora de la Caridad.

At first Miguel takes D-tabs whenever he wants them. They make everything dull for him, comfortably far away, but when the prison is evacuated he has to cut back. They’re all shoved in smaller quarters with unfamiliar inmates around them; he needs to be alert. So he starts taking them at night, and continues that pattern back at Oz.

As the weeks and then months stretch by, he grows more comfortable around Alonzo when he’s not high—more likely to smile, to laugh, to dart in for a hug or occasionally a kiss, even in public—but the D-tabs always push him to make the first step. Alonzo doesn’t mind. He remembers what it was like, those terrifying few months when he first realized that he could actually go up and kiss a boy, that there was nothing stopping him except his own nerves. Gin was his own poison of choice at the time, but Miguel isn’t even gay, so it makes sense that he would need something stronger. They spend long, drowsy hours in the night kissing, exploring hypersensitive skin with lips and fingers.

“I can’t remember the last time anyone ever did that,” Miguel says hoarsely, staring, the night that Alonzo first interlaces their fingers and just lies there, happily holding Miguel’s hand.

 _I love you_ , he thinks desperately. _Fuck me, this wasn’t supposed to happen, not with a guy like you but I love you I love you I love you._

He takes several deep breaths and presses his lips together firmly until he can think of something else to say.

“Did this hurt?” he blurts out, tapping the tattooed rose on Miguel’s hand.

“Like a motherfucker.”

“What about the others?”

“Not so bad. The skin’s too thin here, and there are too many bones. When it was finally done, I swear to God I could have kissed the guy who was doing it.”

“Trying to make me jealous, darling?” Alonzo asks, and Miguel smiles and kisses him.

They talk about Miguel’s tattoos for a while. The nude woman on his arm is a scratcher and he mildly regrets it; he got the whirling mass of lines on his shoulder to balance it out. Cheap and trashy versus professional and beautiful. He got the rose a few weeks before he was arrested. He doesn’t know flowers, he says, but he loves roses. There was a neighbor down the street who always had flowerboxes full of huge pink ones, and one day they must have moved or died because the flowers withered. The next day Miguel went to the tattoo parlor. And the newest one, acquired in those fleeting weeks he was free of Oz, is psalm 61 on his back. Miguel’s smoky voice is holy in the darkness as he recites it.

_Hear my cry, O God; attend unto my prayer._  
_From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I._  
_For thou hast been a shelter for me, and a strong tower from the enemy._  
_I will abide in thy tabernacle for ever: I will trust in the covert of thy wings._

Alonzo is about to bring up the circles on Miguel’s shoulder, but then a hack walks by and raps sharply on the glass. It’s extremely irritating that every sign of affection is taken as a sign of sex, and they both flip him off before Alonzo gives Miguel a good night kiss and returns to his own bunk.

Six and a half months into Torquemada’s sentence, McManus walks down into Em City and knocks on the door of his pod, looking somber.

“I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, Alonzo,” he says. “But your father died last night. He had a stroke.”

“Oh. Well,” Alonzo says, because it seems like he should say something.

“The funeral is Wednesday; I can arrange for you to be there.”

“McManus, I have every confidence that bastard can find the way to hell without my assistance,” he says coldly. Then he goes to dinner.

He’s uncommunicative at dinner. Moody. Fiona and Gabe twitter and natter meaninglessly and he loves them for it—it is a fact that they are the shrewdest, most calculating people in Oz, and somehow they have managed to retain their kindness as well—but Miguel is sitting with Rebadow and Beecher. He looks over once at the beginning of the meal and raises an eyebrow. Alonzo blows him a kiss, and Miguel smiles and goes back to his food.

They meet that night, in their pod. Alonzo is lying on the top bunk, staring up at the ceiling without saying anything, when Miguel comes in.

“Guessing you had issues with your old man?”

“What?”

“McManus told me. Thought you might be upset, and since we’re ‘close’…”

He shrugs. Alonzo looks at him for a moment and then turns back to the ceiling.

“My father and I haven’t spoken since I was sixteen. We didn’t have issues—we didn’t have anything.”

With a pang, he thinks of Auntie Antonio, who had owned the first hole-in-the-wall gay bar that Alonzo had visited, when he was sixteen. Auntie had checked the shitty fake ID he brought and laughed out loud, and from that moment on had been a better parent than either of the Torquemadas had ever dreamed of being. He doubts he will be allowed to go to Antonio’s funeral. Oz only recognizes family by blood.

Miguel steps up on the bottom bunk and rests his folded arms on Alonzo’s mattress.

“You ever been to the hospital ward? My father works there. He’s been in Oz since he was eighteen.” He grins. “I was a conjugal baby.”

Alonzo smiles, because the fact that Miguel is trying to _make_ him smile is so goddamn endearing. He reaches out and runs two fingers over Miguel’s cheek, resting just at the corner of his mouth. Miguel turns his head and kisses his fingertips, and then returns to his own bunk.

The night drags by slowly; Alonzo can’t seem to fall asleep. Some time around midnight he begins to cry. He has no idea why. At first he tries to stop it, tries to hold back the tears, but it’s like trying to hold his breath. His lungs swell and swell, and then burst with a tattered sob. He rolls over quickly, pressing his blind eye in the pillow, and tries to be as quiet as possible. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about his father. He _doesn’t_. He never has, not since that goddamn day when he sat crying in a puddle of rum and crushed glass, but he’s _still_ crying.

He’s so focused on the sound of his own breathing, on trying to keep it even and quiet, that he doesn’t notice when the steady rhythm of Miguel’s is broken. The creak of springs is so unexpected that it startles the tears away.

“C’mere.”

He shakes his head.

“Then move over.”

Miguel climbs up on the top bunk and pushes him over to make room for the two of them. They really don’t fit, but Miguel loops an arm around Alonzo’s shoulders and stays close. He kisses his wet eyelids.

“I _hated_ the son of a bitch.”

“I know, baby, I know.”

“He addressed me as ‘faggot’ for a week straight when I tried to sign up for singing lessons. I was _seven_.” He hiccups, or laughs, or sobs again. “And I still can’t sing for shit.”

“Me neither.”

“He put me in the hospital three times and I don’t think he even noticed. That _motherfucker_.”

Miguel kisses his eyelids again.

The next morning, someone calls Alonzo a faggot as he walks by; he wouldn’t have noticed if Miguel didn’t jump on the guy and punch two of his teeth in. It’s the first fight Miguel’s started in months, although he has been on the defensive several times, protecting Torquemada’s crew from the Homeboys or the Irish or even (though rarely) the Latinos who aren’t happy with the way the tit trade is drying up. Luckily that reputation does his some good. McManus rules in Miguel’s favor despite the conflicting eyewitness testimonies, and he is only given a little time in the hole, not a sentence to solitary.

“That was idiotic,” Alonzo says coldly when Miguel is released. “Don’t do it again.”

Then he shoves him against a wall and kisses him breathless, in full view of most of Em City, until the hacks pull them apart. Miguel shuffles his feet, looking sheepish, but then he squares his shoulders and mouths off again, the way only Miguel can.

“Love you too, chulo,” he says with a roguish wink. There is a cut on the left side of his mouth from his opponent’s ring. It will scar, and Alonzo will spend long, sweet moments tracing it with his tongue.

Most of Miguel’s scars are on display. On his face, his hands, his chest. But there are some that Alonzo doesn’t discover until the first time they have sex, almost a year after they meet.

It’s so completely unexpected. They’re both high, one D-tab each, just enough to make everything slower and softer. Alonzo always thinks of soda pop, or champagne, when he takes D. Everything is fizzy and smooth and pleasant. He lies in Miguel’s bunk, running one hand over his chest and drinking in the taste of his lips. The hacks have left them alone tonight; they’ve been like this for an hour. When Miguel pulls away, Alonzo makes a disappointed noise in the back of his throat and Miguel chuckles.

“Don’t worry, I ain’t going nowhere. I was just thinking… it’s kind of funny, isn’t it, how people get different kinds of highs from the same thing. You know what I’m saying? Like with Guerra, he went fucking nuts. Even before he started seeing things and shit, he was all energy. Destiny’s never made me feel like that. It’s like—like it takes me out of my head, puts me into my body. I don’t feel happy or sad, but I _feel_ things more. Touch. Heat.” His hand creeps up the bottom of Alonzo’s shirt, rests on the flushed skin of his stomach and chest. “Sometimes I get hard.”

Electricity bubbling through his veins.

“Do you ever get hard, baby?” Miguel whispers, and their gazes meet. It’s hard to see each other in the dark—the light from the windows only makes the contrasting shadows deeper—and Alonzo hardly knows how to relax. One of them likes men but not sex, the other sex but not men. This is ridiculous. This should be ridiculous.

But he leans forward and sucks Miguel’s bottom lip into his mouth, and slowly guides his hand downwards. He’s done this much, once or twice, and he’s surprised at how quickly his cock hardens at the touch. He hums and runs his hand up and down Miguel’s side, and Miguel pushes him onto his back. He straddles Alonzo’s hips, leaning down so he doesn’t hit his head on the top bunk, and bites the corner of his jaw.

“ _Qué quieres? Quieres que te la mamen? Quieres que te cojan?”_

He can’t breathe. He wants to laugh hysterically at the fact that Miguel once thought he wanted to make him his bitch—as though he has _any_ idea what he’s doing, any idea what he _wants_. No, the problem is that he always knows what he wants, except when it comes to Miguel. He can no longer think, can’t do anything except feel.

“I want to come between your thighs,” he says finally, a little short of breath and Miguel makes a puzzled noise. It’s a relief to fall back to the tones he used before any of this shit happened, the ones carefully constructed to make him sound bizarre and untouchable. “Ancient Greeks, mi amor. They appreciated male beauty. They thought that love between men was pure, selfless… that lovers made the best partners and guides in life. But you couldn’t fuck a Greek-born boy in the ass—oh no. That was too _common_ ,” he says, echoing his words that first night, brushing a hand through Miguel’s hair. “So they would simply slip their cocks between the thighs of a pretty boy. Kings, generals, even the gods would indulge.”

He whispers this last against Miguel’s lips and feels them tremble with uncertainty.

“All right. I can think of a couple things that would be more exciting, but all right.”

They don’t move on right away. The kissing is nice. The press of their bodies is nice. The slow, sure drag of their hands over skin made soft as velvet by the drugs is nice. After a while, though, the touches turn more towards their declared purpose. Along with the drugs, Alonzo has been using his connections to supply a small underground trade of items that the queer men of Oz, in particular, will find useful—like condoms (which, to his shock and irritation, were not considered a priority by inmates or the administration, even with the AIDS ward growing more packed by the day) and lube. He rips open a small packet and lazily begins to dribble it onto the delicate skin of Miguel’s inner thigh. Not much, not enough to make their bodies slippery, just enough to ease the friction. Miguel’s leg twitches at the coldness of the first touch, and Alonzo chuckles. He wraps his whole hand around the inner half of his lover’s leg and moves up, slowly creeping towards his upper thigh, and that is when he finds the scars.

They are very discreet; no longer than two inches at the most, and placed in such a way that they could probably never be seen unless Miguel was completely naked, with his legs spread wide, in favorable lighting. But this close, Alonzo can feel them. Five on one leg, four on the other, all parallel to each other, and from the way that some wobble, the width of them, he can tell that they have been gouged deep. He tries to keep his face blank as he rubs his thumb over one scar in particular again, trying to assess if it really does feel rougher than the others, as though it is weeks old rather than months or years.

“Don’t worry about it,” Miguel says dismissively, tugging Alonzo’s fingers up further. And then he finds himself giving Miguel Alvarez a handjob while discussing his self-inflicted scars as though this—any of this, all of this—is normal. “None of ’em are fresh enough to bleed, it’s fine.”

“But some of them _are_ fresh?” he asks.

“Well, yeah.” Then Miguel realizes what he’s asking, and he laughs. He wraps his arms around Alonzo’s neck, kissing along his jaw and murmuring into the skin beneath his ear. “Don’t worry about it, baby. I was fucked up long before you got here, and I’ll be fucked up long after you leave.”

“Run away with me, darling.”

“Yeah? Where to?” He guides Alonzo’s cock between his legs, flexing the muscles in his thighs, and kisses his chin. “I’ve always wanted to see Tierra del Fuego.”

“I’ve heard Kansas is very enjoyable this time of year,” Alonzo says with a straight face, and tastes Miguel’s crooked grin under his lips.

For some time they are too close for words. They breathe too heavily, panting against bare chests and sweaty shoulders. Stars are bursting behind Alonzo’s eyes, constantly, and he’s amazed. He’s never desired sex, so he never presumed that he would enjoy it so goddamn _much_ once it happened. At one point he is so overwhelmed by sensations, by the smell-touch-taste-sound-sight of Miguel surrounding him, that he pops another D-tab so he can soak it all in. Miguel parts his lips, and reverently he slips the little green pill between them just to watch the beautiful pulse of his throat when he swallows.

“Cum,” Miguel says when Alonzo licks a droplet of it off his pelvis, and then confidently sucks the head of his cock into his mouth. ( _I’ve seen this done a thousand times_ , he thinks. _I know what I’m doing_.) But he’s so focused on acting like he knows what he’s doing that he totally misses when Miguel actually says, and he hums ‘Hm?’ in response. Miguel sucks in his breath and curses and digs his fingers into Alonzo’s tight curls. “ _Christ_. Four years without a goddamn blowjob, it’s hell on earth. Christ. I said—I said, cum. Sweat. Spit. Blood.”

He flattens one hand and runs his palm over Alonzo’s back. Alonzo pulls away and says, very patiently, “What about them, cupcake?”

“Bodily fluids, man,” Miguel grins, and sighs as Alonzo turns back to the task at hand. “Man… man is eighty percent water. So I used to wonder—what if we could just pour ourselves away? Just come and come and keep on coming until there was nothing left but a pile of fucking bones.  Drain out into the ocean. Oh _shit_. Yeah, baby, yeah just like that… fuck…”

It’s the Destiny, making his head spin. But when Miguel comes, Alonzo would be willing to swear he tastes like iron.

They don’t talk about the scars the next morning. Or at any time in the next month. If Alonzo were a better person, he would probably talk to somebody—Father Mukada at the very least, probably Sister Peter Marie. But the problem is that Sister Peter Marie is both a psychologist and a drug counselor, and if Miguel saw her more regularly than he already did, then her vague suspicions would turn into certainty, accusations, and interventions. She doesn’t understand. She hadn’t heard the despair in Miguel’s voice that night in their pod—the rattle in his lungs that was too weak to become a sob. She has no idea what kind of pain she would unleash.

 _I’m helping him_ , he tells himself. _I’m helping him_.

He is being selfish. He knows this. If he were a better person, he would let him go. But for the first fucking time, someone actually _looks_ at him, acknowledges his pain, and notices his scars, and he can’t throw that away. So he watches, and is careful, and keeps Destiny on hand.

One day he walks into their pod to find Miguel lying on his back in with a shiv in his hands. A Gillette Bayonet. He lets it glide over the pads of his fingers lightly, too lightly to draw much blood. At the sound of the latch closing, though, he jumps, and a drop as dark and pure as a garnet runs down his ring finger. He mutters a curse and moves to suck the tiny wound into his mouth, but the sight of it seems to alarm him. He stars wordlessly at the trail of red and then starts to rub his hand frantically against his pant leg.

“Get it out,” he mutters, and his hands are shaking violently. Alonzo sighs.

“Bad trip, honey? Destiny taking you to places you don’t want to go?”

He sits on the bed and Miguel pulls his knees up like a child.

“It’s not my blood,” he says hoarsely. “It’s not—my _body_. I can’t feel it. I need to…. Move,” he orders, and tries to stretch out his legs, letting his thighs fall apart.

“No.”

“ _Move_.”

“No. Give me the shiv, Miguel.”

“Why should I?”

“Because I love you.” If he expects a tearful return of affection, he is disappointed. Miguel blinks and looks mildly puzzled. “You’re shivering, sweetheart. You can’t use a razor blade when you’re shivering.”

“Okay.” Miguel hands him the shiv, and Alonzo places it on the floor.

“It’s cold in here,” he says, so Miguel lifts the blanket and they curl up together for a few minutes. Before long a hack wanders over and half-heartedly rattles on the glass, so Alonzo gets up, but Miguel has fallen asleep.

They speak very little that night—Miguel sleeps through dinner and count—or the next morning. Alonzo thinks that maybe Miguel has forgotten what he said, or maybe he didn’t hear it in the first place, so he doesn’t bring it up. But then, that afternoon, he is in the classroom with Gabe and Fiona when Miguel comes to the door. He lurks for a moment, hands in his pockets and his shoulders a bit hunched, before he comes in and leans against the wall.

“Could you give us a minute?” he asks.

Fiona and Gabe look to Alonzo and he nods minutely. Gabe pats him sympathetically on the hand when he rises to leave, and the significant look he flashes Fiona clearly reads “lover’s spat,” but she only says “Play nice, boys,” and leads Gabe away. Miguel smiles a bit at that, but he keeps his position by the door. He looks uncomfortable; he stares at the ground for a few minutes before he sighs and looks up to meet Alonzo’s waiting gaze.

“See this?” he says, letting two fingers hover over the scar on his cheek. “I did that.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Know why?”

“I was under the impression you didn’t need a reason,” Alonzo says smoothly, crossing his legs. “‘Self-destructive tendencies’ is the word on the street.”

“Huh.” Miguel laughs. “That’s funny. That’s really funny.”

He rubs the back of his neck and sits down at one of the desks.

“Why did you do it?” Alonzo asks, because he feels he’s expected to.

“You know the whole reason I came to Oz was because I cut up a guy like this. He scratched my car, I scratched his face. Beat him up a bit, too. So we got arrested. Me and—and my girlfriend Maritza. She was uh, she was about like eight months pregnant when I got here? At first I didn’t care much, but I talked to Father Mukada a lot, and he introduced me to my grandfather for the first time, I got to see my father again…. It changed things. Listen, it’s like I said, okay? I’ve never done _nothing_ with my life. Nothing. And at this point I never will. But I fucking _loved_ that baby. I loved him more than anyone or anything. I thought, shit, I’ll get out on parole in two years, I’ll get a good job, maybe me and Maritza would get married, and I would _be there_ for my son. Raise him the way my father never could raise me.” He pauses and presses his lips together. “But you know, me and Maritza, on the outside we used to use heroin. A lot. Even after she got pregnant, I thought it wouldn’t hurt, so…”

_No thank you, Miguel said with a low sigh. I hate heroin._

“The baby was sick. I thought, you know, God was trying to punish me or something. I was so fucking proud of myself. I thought I was the smartest son of a bitch around, I had the best car, I had the best girl, I was above the fucking law and nothing bad could ever happen to me. So God was taking it out on my boy. Father Mukada, he says God didn’t work like that, but—”

“Job,” Alonzo murmured quietly.

“What?”

“Job. From the Bible. In order to test his faith, God took away his riches, his house, killed his wife and children.”

“I remember him. Yeah, well, the last couple of years kinda felt like that. But first I thought—I thought I could do something to help.” He flexed his hand, staring at his palm. “First I stabbed my hand. Through the palm, like Jesus, you know? To show Him that I’d do anything for my son. Then I cut my face to show Him I was sorry for all I’d done. Didn’t matter. The baby, he lived about… six days, I think.”

“What was his name?”

The moment he asks, Alonzo realizes that he doesn’t want to know, but Miguel looks up at him.

“Mateo.”

“Mateo Alvarez,” he says, the words rolling off his tongue. “It’s a good name.”

“He was the most beautiful baby. I loved him with all my heart. When he died, you know, it nearly killed me. Killed some part of me. I haven’t loved anybody or anything the way I did before I loved Mateo. Not my mother, not Maritza, not myself. Nobody.”

Slowly, Alonzo stands and walks over to where Miguel sits. He sits on the desk and rests his hand against Miguel’s cheek, and is afraid of the way his black nails look poised to gouge holes in his skin. But Miguel leans into his touch.

“Sounds lonely, cariño.”

“Yeah. But you know, that’s the way it is. Love, it—it doesn’t exist in Oz.” A smile flickers on his face. “Like conjugals and cigarettes.”

Alonzo tries to smile, and swallows thickly.

“Do you want me to move out?” he asks. “I have no desire to force my presence on one who doesn’t want it. If you would like me to stop sharing your pod, giving you drugs… you need only ask.”

“I don’t want you to go. I mean, shit, I’ve killed two people, blinded another, beat up God knows how many, and I treat myself like crap… and you still look at me like the sun shines out of my ass. Unconditional love. You know how fucking rare that is?” Miguel grins wider, and the sadness in his face is forcefully shoved back, locked carefully away in the corner of his brain where he keeps it so he can survive. He glances down at his hands, curling and uncurling his fingers. “It’s probably not good for me, and it’s probably not good for you. If I were a better person, I’d let you go, but…”

Alonzo laughs in the back of his throat and strokes his thumb over the smooth skin of Miguel’s cheek, and then over the fine line of his scar. It’s even more beautiful now that he knows what it means. Not an accident, not malice, but devotion. He knows that he is not capable of that kind of devotion, but he wonders if he was at some point. If he were, he lost it long before Oz.

“Don’t feel guilty. You and I, Miguel, I think we deserve each other.”

Miguel acknowledges him with a quirk of his lips. He looks up and then his eyebrows pull together curiously. He reaches up and touches Alonzo’s temple, with his thumb resting just at the corner of his eye.

“Can you see out of this eye?” he asks.

Alonzo almost laughs. He leans down and gives Miguel a soft kiss.

“No,” he says against his lips. “Scar tissue.”

**Author's Note:**

> Pobrecito… te progeré: Poor thing… I’ll protect you.
> 
> Nuestra Señora de la Caridad: Our Lady of Charity (Patron Saint of Cuba. Bobby Cannavale is Cuban, and Ricardo Alvarez says in canon that he’s from Havana, so I’m assuming both Miguel and Alonzo are Cuban)
> 
> Qué quieres? Quieres que te la mamen? Quieres que te cojan?: What do you want? Do you want me to suck you? Do you want to get fucked?


End file.
